Saturday

Jun 9, 2018 at 3:43 PMJun 9, 2018 at 10:22 PM

DAYTONA BEACH — A flight instructor and student on board a small plane survived their aircraft slamming into the corners of two houses and then crashing into a retention pond during a heavy thunderstorm Saturday afternoon.

The two men were cut and bleeding after they made it out of the retention pond behind several homes on the 100 block of Campanello Court, witnesses said. People inside the homes were not injured in the crash.

Anthony Scott said he was watching television in an upstairs bedroom when he heard the distinctive buzzing sound of an airplane, and then a “boom, like an atomic bomb.”

He ran to the next room and found a gaping hole in the roof’s corner. He then went to the backyard and saw that the plane had plowed through a stand of trees and plunged into the retention pond.

“The airplane's wheel was sticking up out of the water,” he said of the plane. "It was upside down, and the two guys were crawling out of the water.”

Authorities arrived on scene shortly after 3 p.m., and the men were transported to Halifax Health Medical Center with minor injuries, said Sasha Staton, spokeswoman for the Daytona Beach Fire Department.

The National Transportation Safety Board will remove the plane from the retention pond and investigate the crash, said Daytona Beach Police Department spokeswoman Lyda Longa.

The flight instructor and student were part of ATP flight school, authorities said. They were not identified Saturday, and there was no information about their route. This was the fourth plane crash in the Volusia-flagler area since early April.

Debris was strewn about the upstairs bathroom where the plane had ripped apart the roof. Scott said he believed that the "pilots did the best they could to avoid hitting the house."

The plane also clipped the roof of a neighboring home, belonging to Oleg Tzanev. He said he came outside to find the plane’s white wreckage at the water’s edge.

“The bottom of the fuselage was ripped off,” he said.

Kevin Greene said that a fast-moving thunderstorm had descended upon the neighborhood just before the plane went down.

“There was large hail, black thunderclouds and bolts of lightning,” he said.

When nearby neighbors came out to see the crash, the plane was largely submerged. All that could be seen of the aircraft were some small twisted sheets of metal. A wheel stuck out of the water.

Many neighbors were dumbfounded that no one was killed, but they were not surprised about the crash. Greene said that the flight pattern at Daytona Beach International Airport had recently changed, causing planes to fly low over the homes there.

He and others went outside to watch them pass in the night sky.

“They came right over us,” he said. “The lights on the planes were blinking off the houses.”

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